Wow. All this discussion to make Julia only *as fast as* the old scripting languages? I gotta say that worried me a bit. What do you do when there's no code to compare? How will you know that it was really a good idea switching from Matlab/Python to Julia?
Considering what the develops proudly advertize about performance (what I think is why most people would even consider changing to it), shouldn't the language be designed as to put the user in the best performant direction most of the time? Matlab does a good job on that with fewer but simplified and efficient data structures, supporting vectorized code etc. In my short experience with Julia, it seems that there are a lot of ways to do the same thing, some of which very bad in terms of performance, like the original code in this post. If Julia can't be easily faster and less verbose than R for example, we could just forget about it...
